nimbletoad blog

“People now understand what we stand for — the participatory and open Web…” John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla, made this statement in Wired Magazine during an interview about his Firefox strategy and how he has made a successful business out of what started as an open source project.

“Instead of relying on individual brilliance, we rely on enabling a network around the world, like Wikipedia does,” Lilly continued.

This really struck home when I read this since this is the same idea that we stand for at Nimbletoad [not to mention, our favorite internet browser is Firefox]. Integration and customization are two of the most important reasons we support the open source community – they directly effect our clients. Because of open source products, we are able to provide custom-tailored solutions, while increasing turnaround time and cost effectiveness. We fulfill our clients’ specific website needs with seamless integrations which makes for better user experience. Customization for better user experience is also a reason that John Lilly said Mozilla supports open source.

There is great controversy over the use of open source though, mainly dealing with economics. Opposition to open source says that it is damaging to the market of commercial [proprietary] software. Standish Group reports have even shown a significant drop in the proprietary software industry, estimated at $60 billion per year lost; however, what they don’t show is the creation of several new market opportunities that are the result of the open source community.

Wikipedia lists a few:

• Providing support and installation services; similar to IT Security groups, Linux Distributions, and Systems companies.
• Using the software as a stepping stone to sell a higher-end product or service; e.g., OpenOffice.org vs. StarOffice.
• Cost avoidance / cost sharing: many developers need a product, so it makes sense to share development costs (X Window System and the Apache web server)

Not only are these markets created, adding to the economic benefits of open source software, but there are also other important benefits that cannot be overlooked. Security and defects are greatly reduced by being able to see source code and having thousands of developers working towards a solution. Studies have shown that that open-source software does have a higher flaw discovery, quicker flaw discovery, and quicker turn around on patches.

I met Alex Bogusky last night.

The room was very warm when I went to bed. I fell asleep on top of the covers wearing a thin pair of hospital scrubs quietly contemplating what I had heard at his lecture just hours before. The two kittens I was taking care of slept next to me. I forget what I was dreaming about when I was suddenly ripped from my sleep by an intense pain…

… Detecting movement a kitten pounced onto me and dug in. In confused terror, I grabbed the kitten and pulled its teeth away which only caused its claws to dig in further. Big mistake.

About an hour later the bleeding subsided.

Amazingly, I still made it to work the next day.

What does my kitten assault have to do with Alex Bogusky? Nothing.

Or, maybe it does?

Earlier that night Alex talked about how he wanted to be forgettable. At the time I took it as the musings of a pseudo-celebrity that has the luxury of being remembered. However, at work the next day my kitten story made any comments about the Bogusky talk seem boring. No one wanted to hear how the talk was. They just wanted to hear about the kitten fiasco.

People will remember my kitten story long after they have forgotton who told it to them. It was then that I understood Alex’s comments about being forgettable. Creative people should give a rats ass about being remembered as long as the public never forgets their work.

We are hard at work building out Vinecat, an online wine cellar manager. Our goal was to allow anyone to have easy access to their wine cellar no matter where they were. However, we might have set our sights a little too low.

Leave it to the French to kick it up a notch. Why stop at cellar data? It looks like they have figured out a way to give you access to your actual wine. Anytime… Anyplace… All that you need is WIFI and an open USB port.

….Now my humping dog USB key is officially lame.

Scaffolding is gone? Well… sort of.
In Rails 2.0 the method scaffold is gone from the ActionController::Base so there is no dynamic scaffolding.

So what is a developer to do?
You could uninstall Rails 2.0 and downgrade to an older version of Rails, but what is the fun in that?

Our hats are off to Leonardo Borges for saving us from Rails 2.0 frustration, or worse – starting from scratch.

Now that the dynamic scaffold is gone, we’re left with the static one.
Ok, let’s try it then:

$ script/generate scaffold contact

And it won’t work again! At the end of the output, you will get something like this:

Another migration is already named create_contacts: db/migrate/001_create_contacts.rb

It really means that if your model is meant to be used by a scaffold, you better generate it in the same line. It will fail, afaik, if the model previously existed. Destroy your model and controller, and execute the following:

$ script/generate scaffold Contact name:string email:string

Done! Just run your migrations, startup your server and your new scaffold in rails 2.0 will be working gracefully!

Just poured one out for the “homies”.

Long live BASIC and the summer of ‘83. Long live Computer Camp!

Hackers have always had their own kung-fu.

$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf “%5d\t%s\n”,a[i],i}}’|sort -rn|head
424 cd
263 rm
243 mplayer
241 git
179 sudo
155 pod
142 ack
141 perl
101 ll
100 m

http://plasmasturm.org/log/497/

If you understand admire, If not be afraid… very afraid. If you want to be cool, add to the meme.

We’ve already ordered staff t-shirts with our shell history emblazoned.

http://www.dehora.net/journal/2008/04/10/that-looks-about-right/

http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2008/apr/10/meme